The Surface of Things
by Sadie Flood
Summary: Paris tries to unwind on a Saturday afternoon, but her plans are foiled. Written for the Improv.


Title: The Surface of Things  
Author: Sadie Flood (sadieflood666@yahoo.com)  
Rating: PG-13  
Improv: sonata, pie, automatic, leaves   
Disclaimer: I don't own anyone, thank God, and I don't own the Leonard Cohen lyrics interspersed throughout the story. I also stole the title from a Lori Carson song.  
Author's Note: I decided to challenge myself by writing about a character I don't like (not Paris, the other one). I think I've finally managed to squick *myself*.  
Spoilers: Tiny little reference to the end of season 1 and early season 2.

* * * 

"You can add up the parts but you won't have the sum  
You can strike up the march, there is no drum  
Every heart, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee."

"Goddamn it," she whispered to no one in particular, ducking her head and pretending to be absorbed in writing something very important in her notebook. Maybe he wouldn't notice her. Maybe if she tried hard enough to be invisible, it would miraculously happen for the first time in history. Spontaneous invisibility. She could write a book. Go on talk shows. Making history had always been one of her goals. Wouldn't it just be fabulous if she could get that one out of the way early? Maybe then she could relax a little.  
  
But, as usual, wishing and hoping stubbornly refused to pay off, just like Dusty said, and suddenly he was standing directly in front of her, making a conspicuous effort to focus on her instead of the words she was writing. He smiled and, rather anticlimactically, said, "Hi, Paris."  
  
It wasn't that she didn't like him, exactly. She liked all her teachers. Unfortunately, every one she'd ever had turned out to be a disappointment in the end. When the school year began, it was full of potential. Other mothers shipped their kids off to school with exhortations to make friends or get involved in school activities. She, on the other hand, looked forward to meeting her teachers, all of whom she would adore at first. She would become slavishly devoted; work extra hard, do extra work, anything she could think of to make herself stand out as the best.   
  
But then, halfway through the year, there would be a revelation: a messy divorce, pregnancy, alcoholism, a forbidden interdepartmental affair. It would trickle down-soon the students would be gossiping, scribbling rumors on hastily-crumpled bits of paper during class, spreading information like disease. And for her, the illusion would be shattered. The once-admired disseminator of endless knowledge was always revealed to be a simple mortal, as capable of making catastrophic mistakes in the name of their own selfish desires as everyone else she knew. She would still work hard; it was still important to her to be the best, even if she wasn't trying to impress anyone anymore.  
  
Max Medina had been no different.  
  
"Hello, Mr. Medina," she replied, attempting to be just cordial enough to communicate her desire to discontinue the conversation at his earliest convenience.  
  
"Working hard?" Had it been his unfortunate dalliance with a student's mother, their messy break-up, or his tendency to ask inane questions that had ruined Mr. Medina for her? She couldn't remember.  
  
"Not really," she said, snapping the composition book closed. Surely he would get the message now. She tried chanting it in her head: go away, go away, go away. Either he couldn't hear her plea, or he chose to ignore it, opting instead to sit in the chair opposite her with his coffee in one hand and a book in the other. She tried not to show her displeasure at this development, offering him a tight smile.  
  
"That's surprising." He was trying to be friendly. Why? Maybe he'd liked her. But it was suspicious. She'd barely seen him since the last class they'd had together, a year ago, and when she had, they certainly hadn't spoken, not casually, not like this. What did he want?  
  
"Sometimes I take a day off."   
  
"Well deserved, I'd imagine."  
  
"Yes."  
  
Pause. He sipped his coffee and glanced around the fairly empty café, formerly her secret sanctuary on a Hartford street corner. Was he waiting for her to say something else? Maybe he was simply waiting. Waiting for someone else to arrive. Yes. Perfect. A matter of minutes. Seconds, even. She relaxed a little. She could deal with seconds, or even minutes. A deadline could be so comforting. "How are you these days?" she asked a little more pleasantly.  
  
He looked a bit taken aback, perhaps by the sudden change in demeanor or the idea that she would actually be interested in the answer to that question. He tried to cover his surprise quickly by laughing--rather disingenuously, she observed. "I'm okay, uh, you know."  
  
She nodded as though she did indeed know.  
  
"What have you been up to?"  
  
Certainly not phrasing questions like that, she noted imperiously, amusing herself. "Oh, you know. Studying. Working hard." She allowed a tinge of sarcasm to inflect her voice as she parroted his previous, ridiculous question. He regarded her curiously, and she instantly regretted her automatic instinct to be caustic, what with old habits dying hard and all. She wanted to say: I'm sorry, I don't mean to be who I am. Sometimes. Most of the time, if I'm honest with myself, although there's certainly no reason for me to be honest with you.   
  
He recovered and said, "Not at the expense of your social life, I hope." He continued to avoid eye contact, as if to indicate a lack of interest in the conversation because he would be leaving very soon. Any second now, in fact. She hoped, she hoped, she hoped.  
  
"It's not my number-one priority right now, frankly." She glanced around the room, too, to show him she wasn't really there either.   
  
He focused abruptly on her, like he was snapping to attention. "These could be the best years of your life, you know." Was that the best wisdom he had to offer her? Could he be more disappointing?  
  
She snickered. "I doubt it."  
  
"Yeah, me too," he said not unkindly.  
  
Pause.  
  
She couldn't stop herself. "So are you waiting for someone?"  
  
"Hm? Oh. No." Was he lying, or just surprised? "Are you?" he asked, suddenly concerned.  
  
"No," she sighed.  
  
"Sometimes I take a day off too," he said confidentially, as if they had more than that in common. "This is a great little place. Don't you think so? I come here all the time. Have you been here before?"  
  
Too much caffeine for you, she noted. "Um, yeah. It's very quiet, usually."  
  
"Exactly. Kind of feels like it's my little secret."  
  
It's not your little secret. It's mine. Who do you think you are? You're an invader. This table is Northern Ireland, and you're the British. You don't belong here. Get out!   
  
Oh, blah. It had been a bad day, and it apparently wasn't going to get better. There was no point in taking it out on Mr. Medina, even if he did make it so very easy. And tempting. "I know what you mean," she offered nicely.  
  
The question occurred to her suddenly, almost like a revelation: if he's not waiting for someone, why is he still here? Is he waiting for me to leave? That's stupid. I was here first. I'm not going anywhere. In fact, I think I'll sit here until he leaves. I don't care how long it takes. This is not your quiet little corner of the world, Mr. Medina. It's mine, and I won't give it up without an arduous fight, at the end of which I will inevitably emerge victorious. You can't win.  
  
"What are you reading?" she asked, almost pleasantly.  
  
He looked down at the forgotten book on the table as if it belonged to someone else. "Uh, 'Three Moments of Love in Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn.' It's an analysis of-"  
  
"You're interested in Leonard Cohen?"  
  
His eyebrows flicked upward for half a second before he admitted, "Yeah, I'm a fan."   
  
She couldn't control her own confession: "There's just something about his voice that just, it really affects me, you know? And his lyrics, of course, God--I mean--well, yeah," she nodded, catching up with herself, finally. "I'm a fan, too."  
  
They smiled at the same time, an accident that made them seem like conspirators. 

* * *

"Forget your perfect offering  
There is a crack, a crack in everything  
That's how the light gets in."

To explain the situation forced her to disclose much more about herself and the details of her home life than she liked, but she felt it would be unfair to be stingy with someone upon whom she was imposing, no matter how reluctant she was to impose. Her mother had needed the car. Her mother had dropped her off at the café with a promise to return by 6. Her mother, at 6, was still an hour and a half away, and she could think of no one else to call who might actually come.  
  
Certainly he had a car, and driving her home wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience; after all, he'd sat across from her all afternoon of his own volition, another fifteen minutes of her company wouldn't kill him. So she could come up with several reasons why asking for a ride would be perfectly reasonable. But she hated to ask. Appearing vulnerable was one of her least favorite things to do, up there with riding Ferris wheels and swimming in the ocean.  
  
She made the request in her typical clipped, straightforward manner, and he agreed. She tried not to show her relief. Instead she thanked him cordially as she strapped herself into the passenger seat, making it sound like she'd had a back-up plan just in case, but how pleasant it was that she wouldn't have to use it. To fill the ensuing silence, he told her as many details he could remember about the new luxury car, and how he'd felt guilty for buying a car with more space than he could ever use, but that the extra insulation was a benefit in traffic because it made him feel imposing.   
  
He said, "I love to drive." Five minutes later she suddenly found herself at the end of a story she'd never told anyone. On the Sunday after she got her driver's license, she was out practicing. She drove past the grocery store. Past her mother's favorite restaurant, the café where they'd met, bookstores and video arcades. She stopped two hours later at a gas station. She realized she had no idea where she was headed. Confronted with boundless freedom, all she wanted was someone to tell her where she should go. So she turned around and drove home. It began to happen frequently, and now it was a weekly tradition.   
  
Every time, she stopped at the same gas station, frozen with indecision, paralyzed by the fear of making a wrong choice. The clerk smiled at her when she went inside to pay for gas and a soda now. She was a regular. If she'd let him know her name, he would call her by it.  
  
Max pulled up in front of the address she'd given him and stopped the engine. In the dark, she felt him look over at her with such heartbreaking empathy that she wanted to close her eyes and die right there rather than figure out how to end the conversation more gracefully than simply getting out of the car and running into the house. She closed her eyes. She didn't die. She took a breath and asked, "So, where do you think should I go?"

* * *

"And I just don't care what happens next  
looks like freedom but it feels like death  
it's something in between, I guess."

In the morning she awoke in a bachelor's bed. The sheets were flat and almost hard, like they would be in a hotel room, and there were only two pillows. She sat up slowly, perfectly aware of every move she'd made the night before, the details of how she'd ended up in this position all too clear. She made an effort to purposely blur her memory so that later she could pretend she didn't remember the afternoon, the evening, the night, and the morning. That way she could pretend it was a story she once read, or that it had happened to someone else. This was something Louise would do. Louise had told her about this. It certainly hadn't been her sitting on a bed that belonged to someone whose bed she should really not be sitting on. Absolutely not.  
  
Unfortunately, in order to get to the place where this would all be a distant memory, related to her by another person, fictional or otherwise, she would have to get out of this bed and somehow get herself home, as expediently as possible. She found yesterday's clothes draped neatly over a chair and pulled them on quickly. Her wrists throbbed and her neck ached. She tried not to remember why as she headed tentatively out of the bedroom, toward the kitchen.   
  
There he was, as pleasant as he could be. He greeted her nicely and offered her a piece of leftover pie, his Sunday breakfast. A bit shell-shocked and still at a loss about how she'd be getting from his place to hers, she accepted. A sonata she couldn't conclusively identify in this state of mind played softly in the background. He sat across from her and read the newspaper. She took a section and pretended to scan it as her mind raced. If he didn't want to talk about it, then fine, she didn't either. So they didn't. They talked about the book reviews and the United Nations and the letters to the editor. And then he drove her home.

* * * 

"And like a blessing come from heaven  
for something like a second  
I was healed and my heart was at ease."

She spent the next week convincing herself it didn't happen. She didn't see him at school. No one mentioned his name. He was absent from the café on all subsequent visits; thankfully so, she thought.   
  
But when she stopped at the gas station two hours out of town on a Sunday afternoon three weeks after it happened, or after it didn't happen, depending on your perspective, she made a phone call before she turned around.   
  
"I'm here again. Where should I go?"  
  
He paused and she wondered if she should identify herself or if she should hang up the phone.  
  
"You should go wherever you think you could be happy," he finally answered carefully.  
  
She hung up the phone. What kind of an inane answer was that? It offered no conclusions, no possibilities from which to choose. But she knew what he meant, and that's where she decided to go.   
  
It was a temporary fix, of course, and if she thought about the implications for too long her head started to hurt like it would never stop. But a fix of any kind, even temporary, would do for now, and she could keep pretending it wasn't her and he could keep pretending it wasn't a big deal, and for a couple of hours they could listen to Cohen and sonatas and read the newspaper and she could relax inside the skin of an alternate persona, she could be the kind of girl who would do this, and no one ever had to know. His house was closer to hers than the gas station two hours outside of town, anyway.   
  
She went inside and when the clerk smiled at her, she said, "I won't be coming here anymore. I just thought you should know."  
  
He just looked at her like he knew it wasn't true; he looked at her like he knew she'd be back, if not next week, then in two weeks, or three, or four. He dispensed her change and said, "Okay."  
  
And maybe he was right. How should she know? For now, this was refuge, a comfort. Like a flannel nightgown, or knowing all the answers on a test. And there was hope, and a feeling that felt like something approximating freedom.   
  
The man said: "Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee."  
  
It was close enough.


End file.
